


Do No Harm

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medical, First Meetings, John Doe - Freeform, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-28 20:58:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14457615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: Bruce Wayne, MD, makes the acquaintance of a mysterious stranger. It's a hard world to live in. You can make it worse, or you can try to make it better.





	Do No Harm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cupidty11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cupidty11/gifts).



> for Gayliens, who came up with the idea and asked me if I would take a crack at it. God DAMN I am sorry it took me so long.  
> If somebody wants more of this I wouldn't say no to being [bought a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/desdemonakaylose)

It looks like it’s going to be a busy morning at the Martha Wayne Free Clinic, like every morning is, and yet - with the chairs full of wheezing children and the rocking expectant mothers, with the hot crowd of bodies packed shoulder to shoulder - in the doorway, with your coat in your hand, you stop completely for a moment.

“Who’s that?” you ask Leslie, who is just closing up shop from the graveyard shift.

She pauses, her hands trembling with exhaustion as she unhooks her stethoscope (how _are_ you going to maneuver her into taking a vacation this year) and follows your eye. “I have no idea,” she says, “he’s not a regular. Looks like he’s seen better days, eh?”

That’s putting it delicately. You’ve seen drowned rats that looked more healthy. He’s so pale you wonder if there’s any blood left in his body. Hell, wouldn’t you just love to be the first doctor in Gotham to treat a vampire, wouldn’t that just be the icing on your strange little cake here, after that man they scooped out of Slaughter Swamp and brought straight to you in February, after the woman who fell from a tenth story window and then woke up gasping on your operating table, wouldn’t a vampire be just what you needed next. You wave down the receptionist, Mary, and ask her if that man has filled out any paperwork yet.

She flips through a stack of papers, although her mouth is already a hard downturn. “No,” she says, “nothing since he turned up. He won’t fill out anything, he just insists on sitting there and waiting his turn. I don’t know what he’s even here to treat.”

You check your watch. You’re about half an hour early, you were planning on doing some much needed maintenance on the equipment in OP Room 2, but. You suppose that can wait another day.

“Go ahead and send him in to me,” you say, grabbing a lab coat from the rack. “Just file him as a John Doe and I’ll fill in what I can once I talk to him.”

In the hall your cane taps along lightly as you bid the nurses good morning, all of their busy faces brightening for the blink of a smile as you pass. It’s as nice in here as anything can be in the Narrows, as clean as you can keep it. When you built this facility, you gutted the structure down to the support beams more or less, and you had it reassembled to your _exact_ specifications. There had been a lot of curiosity from the neighborhood, a couple getting-to-know-you robberies before it became clear that your sanctum sanctorum was more than up to scratch for the average casual burglary. Almost nothing is ever built in the Narrows anymore, the oldest standing neighborhood in Gotham, a beautiful decrepit wreck of a once lively downtown.

This was the bottom floor of a hotel once, famous for having a visiting Hollywood Starlet die gruesomely in its art deco lobby. A true Gotham legacy, unfortunately. When you gutted it, you kept the facade. They just don’t build like that any more.

John Doe slides into your examination room a few minutes after you finish setting your things down. Normally this part would be a nurse’s job, but there was something about him - something about the snatch of raw skin between the bottom of his sleeve and his gloves, or about his hunched shape - that pricked at instincts you know better than to ignore. You take a seat at the counter, but you keep your cane in hand.

“Come on in,” you say, as the door clicks open behind you. With the small folder in hand, you turn back to greet him and - for the barest moment, but long enough that your sensei would have shaken his head to see it - you are as stilled as if lightning was running down through you, pinning you with white fire to the earth.

He pushes wild hair off his forehead with his dark gloves, tucking it up under the brim of his hat. The strands are almost radiantly green, like spun glass. He looks at you, straight at you, and his livid red eyelids are full of irises so green they seem ready to pool and run down his cheeks. He is a man constructed from uranium, he is a chemical spill in the shape of a human, and he is looking right at you.

“Ahh,” he says, so dry and rough in his throat that you can’t believe it’s anything but excruciating to speak, “what’s up, Doc?”

Your hand extends, your fingers open and reach, but they feel far away. “Wayne,” you say. “Dr. Bruce Wayne.”

His tongue comes out to flick over his lips, the angry flesh there so red and dark that his tongue seems unnaturally pale in comparison. “Like the old lady, huh?” he says. “Martha Wayne, our lady of perpetual sorrows.”

“My mother,” you say. It’s not a common question, most people know who you are already. But sometimes it slips through the cracks, especially if a patient is new to the neighborhood. There’s no point in delaying the inevitable. Your hand is still open between you.

He startles, and then he smiles. The stretch splits his lips in three places, exposing bloody subdermis to the harsh fluorescent glare. He takes your hand in his leather-smooth grip and squeezes, a little too hard, as if he’s trying to learn the shape of your bones.

“Pleased to meet ya,” he says, “this’d be your place, then.”

“In a way,” you agree. “Why don’t you sit down and tell me a little about why you’re here. I didn’t catch your name?”

“No,” he says, “you didn’t.”

He hops up and leans back on his palms, heels swinging. His shoes look as if they might have been nice once, but they’re hard worn now, the wingtips starting to peel.

“Now what’s a rich boy like you doing in a slum like this,” he says, eyeing the perfectly neat and clean examination room. “You and I both know you could be sleeping off a whole cadre of Brazilian Supermodels on a yacht somewhere right now. What’s it right now? Six thirty in the morning?”

“And you’re awake, I notice,” you remark.

“Heh,” he says. “Haven’t been sleeping so well since I had my fall.”

“A fall,” you say. That is not what you were expecting, if you’re honest. “You don’t seem to have suffered any bone trauma...?”

“What _is_ it,” he says, “that makes a pretty boy like you wanna become a dour old professional? And not even a fancy cardiac specialist, or a brain surgeon! I’ve seen your daddy’s name on half the buildings in this town, Doc, a general practitioner you were not born to be.”

You give him a look, not sure what you’re feeling. “My father was a doctor,” you point out. And you own a controlling interest in the company, just like your parents before you.

“Mmm!” he says, pulling off his gloves with a snap. “So it’s a family trade, huh? Fill those _shoes,_ carry that _weight._ They _are_ empty, aren’t they, I swear I remember it was on the news--don’t the years just get away from us?”

This is getting… awfully personal. You frown, slowly shifting your seat against the counter, readying yourself for something still more out of the ordinary, whatever may come. “Why don’t we get back to your symptoms,” you offer.

He shows you his teeth. There is something terribly wrong with his mouth, with the skin--and you don’t like the teeth a whole lot more, either, although there’s nothing strictly wrong with them.

“I drank myself out of a job,” he says, with a glitter of sharp eyes, much too sharp to belong to a chronic drinker. “Oh they didn’t like that, did they, but they liked it when I drank their poison for them, huh? It wasn’t like I planned on it, Doc, I just opened my mouth and the stuff poured in - now would you say that’s any reason to leave a man high and dry, a little dip in the drink?”

The way he surges toward you, the tense knobs of his scarred fingers--the flesh there as red as his lips, raised in tiny wormlike traceries--

You don’t move. “Alright,” you say. “You don’t seem to want to explain anything to me, and I’m running out of time before Dr. Thomkins clocks out, so why don’t I take a stab at your situation, and you can tell me if I’m warm.”

He sits back, delighted, hands coming together in a little clap. “Sounds like a real hoot, Doc. Diagnose away.”

You tap your pen against a series of empty boxes on the paper in front of you. “Most direly, you’re suffering from poorly treated chemical burns in several key locations,” you tell him. “You’ve probably been poisoned, but it’s out of your system by now. You’re a low level mobster, maybe a thief, and you can’t afford to be seen at a real hospital because you’re just petty enough that the GCPD would swoop you up in a heartbeat to make its numbers look a little better for election season. You’re at loose ends, in severe pain, and probably in real danger now that you’ve lost your already unimpressive position in whatever gang you claim allegiance to. Which leads me to the overwhelming question--” your pen stops tapping, “--are you here to rob me?”

For a moment, he only looks at you. His expression is inscrutable, intense but emotionless, eyes glowing in the shadow of his hat. There’s something about his particular ugliness that is almost breathtaking, all his discoloration and ruined flesh stretched over a frame as beautiful as broken glass. And then he smiles.

“You wound me, kind sir,” he says, “what on earth could I ever think to pilfer of _yours_?”

You blow out a puff of air. “I know what they say about me on the streets,” you tell him. “All the talk about a vault under the building, some kind of dragon’s hoard of opioids and expensive serums, whatever it is they’re jonesing for. It’s a myth, you do know that? We don’t keep stocks of hard drugs on the premises.”

He presses a finger to his cheek, livid red to ghost pale. “You’re not surprised by much, are you?”

“I have a practice in the Narrows. I can’t afford to be.”

He makes an unconvinced humming noise. “I re _mem_ ber now,” he says. “It was a double homicide wasn’t it? I remember the city held a vigil - there were candles in the windows, like the night of a Saint Day, flowers on the pavement -”

You snap your folder closed. “If you don’t need my assistance, sir, can you please make way for an actual patient?”

“I remember,” he says again, but this time he tastes the words in his mouth with a kind of wonder, a kind of reverence. “Yesss. I do.”

“I don’t,” you say shortly. You’re not interested in reminiscing. “If that’s all, I’ll see you out.”

His dreamy smile stutters and falls. He regards you with some hesitation, some suspicion. “You would know, I think,” he says, “the place where you can’t tell anymore what’s your body and what’s your heart - what the hurt is, where the rot is, what to cut away -”

He touches his bare ravaged hand to his eye. The delicate skin is inflamed beneath the lashes, which seem almost green themselves when the light catches in them.

“They call it an operating theater, don’t they,” he says. “Spectators! Lights! A bonesaw flourished to wild applause, eh, a performance of suffering and delight, the still beating heart glowing under the limelight. Ahhh, Doc, will you cut it out of me? That’s all I’m looking for, if you’re so keen to know.”

He closes his hand in the rumpled fabric of his shirt, hard worn fabric, stained with something like river water.

“It wasn’t a clean amputation,” he says, watching his own hand like he is a stranger to it. “The edges are still clinging on. They’re going all green and runny.”

“What you’re talking about isn’t a physical trauma,” you say, carefully. “I can’t help you with whatever your trouble is. I know a couple good therapists, solid professionals, I could--”

In a hiccup of laughter, his hand falls from his chest. “Nah-ah Doc, don’t trouble yourself on my account. I’m sorry to take up so much of your time. I’m just looking for some direction, you know, I’m a little lost in the wash. Heh.”

You feel your mouth twist down. In all his hypnotic strangeness, you are instinctively reaching out for something you recognize. There is a solid sliver of pain lodged in the smoke and misdirection, something that you long to take in your fingers and pry free. It’s hard to watch people in pain and not try to do _something_. Why else did you become a doctor?

You stand, taking your cane before you can forget it. He doesn’t pull away as you come towards him - as you lift your hand for him, very gently and slowly, he only raises his chin. With careful fingers you trace the ruination of his lips and lids, the faintly raised scar tissue, searching for signs of pain as you press a little harder here and there. He is watching you, his biohazard eyes unblinking, even as you thumb the delicate skin beneath his lashes. His pupils are expanding, as if he is looking up into the night, but it’s only you, only your shadow falling over him.

“Rate your pain,” you tell him, as your fingertip skims the bow of his lips. “Ten being the worst pain imaginable.”

His tongue flicks out again, and in its flight it just brushes your fingertip. Part of you wants to pull back - that isn’t supposed to happen, that is not normal - but you are afraid to break the gossamer tension of this moment, of the darkness swallowing his eyes.

“Right now?” he says. “Zero. Take your hand back and I’ll give you a better reading.”

You’re going to ignore that - flirtation? Flirtation seems too light a word for the sound of his glass-dust voice pouring over your fingers. Either way, you’re going to ignore it. It’s up to you to be the professional. Even though you probably started this by being so forward, even though this is the first thing you've done to make him answer you so clearly.

You do take your hand back, and he tells you maybe a seven, and you uncap your pen with your teeth and write him a prescription for a skin-application that you know works on chemical burns, because you patented it two years ago. Or your company did, but the formula was yours to start with, before the test groups and the laboratory tweaking.

As you tear off the sheet for him, he intercepts your hand and brings it back up to his cheek. His eyes half-close as he leans into your palm, an omnipresent tension dripping from his body and leaving him newly weak, newly soft.

Now this is certainly not professional, and you really should do something about it. You know if it was any of your staff you would have intervened immediately. Your fingers twitch as you try to gather the willpower to draw back from his loose grip, but the motion never comes. There is such a profound sense of relief in him, such a fragile peace, you cannot bring yourself to deny it. A moment more. Just a moment more.

“When that runs out,” you say, quietly, “come back and get another prescription. We’ll check your progress.”

He sighs. “You are endearingly mundane,” he says. “I really should rob you after all.”

 

 

The next time he appears, he is both more and somehow less put together. The iron certainty of his posture is almost regal, the neat fold of his hands is benevolently patient. As you come into the examination room, closing the door behind you with a click, you can see that the inflammation has died down, although not enough to pass for normal even in a bad light. His clothing is a mess.

“I’m glad to see you again,” you tell him.

“ _Are_ you?” he says, leaning back on his hands.

“I was half convinced they’d fish you out of a river before you could make it back,” you admit, just to see the way laughter flashes over his face. “You don’t seem to be running with a very genteel crew.”

In his breathy laughter, he flicks his gloved fingers. “Oh,” he says, “I’m not running with _them_ anymore. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Let the trash collector have the final say on those clowns.”

Genuine pleasure lights up your chest before you can think twice about why. “Good,” you say, “that’s good. Here, let’s get you up to speed on an actual check up.”

You run through the usual array of a standard health check, which is worryingly off-center on just about every count, from the blood pressure right down to the reflexes. You don’t want to make him unnecessarily worried, but none of this is where it should be for someone of his age and disposition. You’re at a loss by the time you ask him to remove his shirt.

“What’s this now?” he says, with interest.

You shoot him a quelling look. “The damage on your extremities is worrying enough that I really do need to see more to know what I’m diagnosing. This will be quick. I just need to check for tissue and nerve damage.”

He shrugs and undoes the top button of his collar. “Whatever gets your dopamine up, Doc.”

You ignore that, like you’ve ignored all the rest.

“Did you know I was kidnapped thirteen times as a child?” you tell him. He’s down to his shirtsleeves, open over his chest, as you pull on latex gloves. You find that the appearance of latex gloves tends to unnerve people. Hence the personal annecdote.

He lets out a bark of laughter, falling back on his palms. “I bet you were,” he says. “Runaway Wayne Junior, wandering off into every curious side alley in Gotham, poking every bee’s nest.”

“Truth be told,” you say, “I was a pretty bookish child. Never much of a doer. As you can see, that hasn’t changed.”

He tilts his head at you, a knowing little slant to his eyes. “I don’t know about all _that_ ,” he says. “There’s something about you I can’t… quite… put my finger on. I can feel it there like the coil in a spring.”

You pause, a hand hovering over his chest. You don’t like the way he’s looking at you, like he can peel you back and see down into the heart of you, like you are a window into a glass-domed inferno.

“I’m just a man,” you tell him, “trying to do my job with as little mess as possible.”

“Doctor Wayne,” he says, clicking his tongue, “so responsible.”

“I’m very responsible.”

“Sure you are.” He watches you prod at the raised red flesh over his clavicle, leaning into the press. “Now. But I bet you got up to some madcap wildness as a teen, eh, Doc?”

Your lip quirks up despite your better judgement. “When I was nineteen I tried to take a plane to Japan,” you say. “Technically speaking, I was running away from home, although I didn’t think of it like that at the time.”

He hisses at something you’re touching, and you draw back accordingly.

“Tried,” he says, “is an interesting word.”

You go back more carefully. “There was a terrorist attack in the airport where I had a layover,” you say. “Extremists, I think, from a homegrown group. Run of the mill racial purists. In any case, they were good enough at making C4 that it took out the entire terminal where I was waiting for my next flight.”

He whistles. This is more detail than you usually give people, to be quite frank.

“Alright,” you say, firmly switching the conversational track, “could I talk you into a blood test?”

 

 

 

The next time you see him - he still hasn’t given you a name, but you scrawl _Doe_ across the top of his paperwork almost before you can think about it - he’s barely recognizable as the drowned rat who first sat crumpled in your waiting room. You’ve made him a prescription for _refill when empty_ , and his health is improved markedly, and you both delicately do not address the fact once he gets his results, he will not really need to come back until it’s time for an annual checkup. Instead, you talk about the recent news, about the dramatic collapse of the Red Hood gang, which he seems to know a lot about. You pretend not to notice that either, although at this point you know he knows you’re only pretending, and the pretending itself is a kind of silent conversation in its own right.

You’ve just slipped your stethoscope into your ears when you hear the shout - his heart gives a lurch beneath you - outside the examination room. There’s no time for niceties. You rip the door open and race down the hall, ignoring the throb in your leg and everything else, cane tight and useless in your hand.

The man in the mask has your receptionist at gunpoint. All around him the patients are scattered across the ground, hands over their heads, the ones who can move like that anyways. Several older patients tremble in their chairs, immobile and frail. You make a sharp motion at your receptionist, and she hits the deck. The glass between the lobby and the office is bulletproof, you’d be a fool to install anything else in the Narrows, but every breathing body in that outer room is a hostage waiting to happen.

A deep breath, a careful rearrangement of your posture, and you step out into the open with your cane in front of you.

“What seems to be the trouble?” you ask him.

He whirls on you. The mask is a Halloween mask, an O-mouthed ghost. Underneath its sorrowful mourning, the man himself is deeply agitated. You know his type, you’ve seen his type a hundred times before. You give him your most placid, ingratiating smile. It enrages him.

_“You,”_ he says, “you’re the Doc huh? The Wayne?”

He stomps over to you, pistol aiming first at your shoulder, then the wall, then your head in rapid succession. He does not know much about guns. You wish that had kept him from picking one up. Even as you smile dimly at him, your stomach is bubbling with revulsion. The barrel of a gun always brings you back to that night - that first night - in a terribly visceral way.

“Where’s the good stuff!” he shouts. “I know you got it! My bitch sister came out of here yesterday doped up high enough to kill a horse, I wanna know where you’re hoarding that shit!”

The more you smile, the closer he comes. He thinks you don’t understand. He’s going to try and teach you.

In the moment that his outstretched gun arm comes within your reach, you lunge. The heavy handle of your cane whips out as you close your hand around his wrist. Bones crack, the bleat of a scream drowns out the soft thump of his gun bouncing harmlessly across the carpet. You spin him, hook your cane around his throat, and force him to his knees.

“Wha, hah?” he pants, as he clutches his broken fingers to his chest.

You hear the click, behind you, and still pounding with adrenaline-bitter blood, you react. You swing. Belatedly, you find the head of your cane jammed tight against the throat of your current patient, gold flashing heavy and bright over his white skin.

Eyes wide, he stands stock-still in front of you. In his hand there is a hypodermic needle full of something you cannot identify at this distance. For a moment neither of you move: he with his startled eyes flicking over the scene before him, you breathing hard, frozen in your moment of almost-violence.

Slowly, you pull your cane back to yourself. The would-be robber at your feet makes a wounded noise as you release your grip on his throat.

“I believe,” you say, “we’re going to be busy with this for the rest of the morning. Why don’t you come back in next week. We’ll give this another try.”

The man, John Doe, looks you up and down. It is almost as if he is seeing you for the first time: a stranger, an apparition. When his gaze finally comes back to rest on your face, there is something in his eyes that you've never seen before. It glows in him like a hot coal. He licks his lip.

“Yeah Doc,” he says, “you got it.”

 

 

The next time you meet with him, he’s like a whole new man. His skin is smoothed over, evened out, and it takes you a moment to realize it’s the palest foundation you’ve ever seen. You might not have even realized it was makeup, if the slick red lipstick hadn’t given him away.

“To cover the scars?” you ask him, as he sheds his jacket with a flourish. At his vague hum, you say, “Why _red_ lipstick though? It nearly draws more attention than just the tissue damage.”

He pauses, jacket-half folded in his lap, and shoots you a look. “Not butch enough for you?” he asks, with a smile that isn’t a smile at all.

“Nothing like that,” you say. You give it another look, now that you’re used to the idea. “Actually it’s quite striking,” you say. “You wear it well.”

All at once, he’s nothing but amicable. “You old charmer you,” he says, setting the jacket down behind him.

He chats at you for a bit, as you check over his basics, flipping through the chart from two weeks ago. He tells you about something he saw for sale in a shop window on the way here, about a conversation he overheard in a diner yesterday. He never tells you anything about his work, or his family, or his plans. You know so much about the way he lives, and yet, you know nothing about what he is living for.

As you draw back from his chest, stethoscope in hand, he reaches out whip-fast and gets his hand on your cane. Your fingers halt just above his, uncertain of where this is going.

“What’s a young thing like you doing with a cane?” he asks you, drumming the handle.

You pry it free from his grip. “A week after the facility opened, we had an armed intruder. I took a bullet to the knee in the struggle.”

“The struggle,” he says, running his tongue thoughtfully over his teeth.

You say nothing. In your memory, the taste of blood - the numb howling of your injured leg - the nails scrabbling blunt at your face as you pinned a writhing body to the carpet - it’s all as fresh now as it was three years ago. You've learned quite a lot since then.

“The way you _move_ ,” he says. “You’re trained, aren’t you? If it weren’t for that cane, you’d be hot stuff.”

You lift an eyebrow at him. “I promise you, this cane does anything but slow me down.”

He laughs, and by now it’s a familiar sound, something that warms you a little each time. None of his laughs sound quite the same - some of them are wheezy, some of them are honest to god cackles, some of them pitch and crest with a little too much zeal to be wholly comforting. But all of them sound, in one way or another, perfectly truly like _him._

“What was it?” he asks, a little breathlessly. “Dare I dream of Mister Miyagi?”

“Not quite,” you say. For a moment your youth rises up behind you, spectral and melancholy, in the shape of taped wrists and bleeding knuckles. “I studied everything I could get my hands on. I competed in a mixed martial arts tournament when I was seventeen - second place, nationwide.”

“Who’s the busy boy with the blue ribbon?” he asks, sitting forward.

“Girl,” you say. You smile faintly. “Her father was the only master in the world who taught The Way of the Fang. I was head over heels for the style, by the end of the competition.”

You can almost feel the thick quilted texture of the uniform belts under your hand, taste the sweat of a long fight against a difficult opponent.

“Actually,” you say, “the time I tried to fly to Japan, I was chasing after the two of them. Trying to prove I was…”

Ah - What _were_ you trying to prove? That you were independent enough to be treated like an adult? Looking back on yourself, you are exhausted by just how young you really were.

“I’d just finished my first semester at Princeton,” you say, distantly. “I was impatient with the whole thing. I wanted to _fight_ , I wanted to train and surpass even the masters, I thought the clock was ticking out on me and I couldn’t stand listening to lectures on dead imperialists when there was a whole world screaming out for action, for justice…”

“Angry young man,” your patient says, with a knowing curve on his red lips.

You shake your head out of the past.

“I guess you never had the luxury of that old ivory tower mindset,” he remarks, crossing his arms over his knees. “But look at you now, huh? Big change.”

You pretend you don’t know what he means. There was a time when you wanted nothing but a crusade to throw yourself at, a sword to impale yourself on. In your hard young fists there was a terrible hatred, a hope that cut like glass.

“You know I look out on these streets,” he says, “and sometimes I think to myself, Buddy, why don’t we all just burn it to the ground? Start it up again. This stage is set for a comedy we don’t wanna hear the punchline to.”

You frown. “It’s easy to say that,” you say, “until you see who would be caught in the crossfire.”

He cocks his head. There’s something of the animal in him, the cold playful eyes of a predator who knows that mice exist for his personal pleasure.

“Who did _you_ look at, Bruce Wayne?”

The phantom taste of dust fills your mouth. The wreckage was so dark, fingers of light pouring in like solid things through the gaps. The wetness of blood on your lips had almost been a relief. And still, it wasn’t the worst day of your life by a long shot.

“In the airport,” you say, “after the bomb went off, there were so many people with me in the darkness. I came out of it like a miracle, barely even bruised, and some of the others - some of the others, it’s better not to dwell on. There was so much pain, and I was right there and the middle of it, helpless. I’d spent all my time learning how to hurt, how to inflict damage on the people I knew would deserve it, but when the innocent were laid out around me in need -”

There’s one face that always comes to you when you pull on the thread of that day - you were never able to learn her name. She had something lodged in her throat, something that was holding in the disastrous outpour of blood, but only barely. You sat with her for a long time, holding her hand, unable to do anything else.

“I wanted to tear the world apart,” you say. “I still do. I know it’s in me, that black vicious thing, the crusader. It would feel so good to let it out. But I only have one life, and I don’t want to live only for myself.”

Blood and dust - you sat with her until you couldn’t hear the bubble of her breathing anymore. You sat with her until her hand was cold in yours, and you never learned her name.

“My father,” you say, “he helped people in a real way. He saw people in pain and he took their pain away. The mothers of this city don't pray for justice, they can’t afford to. They’re only asking for survival. Revenge doesn’t close wounds. Sutures do.”

You gather yourself up and turn away, peeling off and discarding your gloves neatly. “I never took that flight to Japan. I came back to Princeton, switched majors, and never looked back.”

The room is quiet for a moment. You wonder if you’ve disappointed him. Career crook, gang banger, he probably has his own ideas about pacifism and violence. But when you turn back to him, the look on his face is the look of an artist discovering a new, transcendent vista.

You swallow. It’s a powerful thing to be fixed with, that look. You are frozen beneath it, in a way that you have never allowed yourself to be frozen by anyone.

“What impossible cosmic catastrophe,” he says, “cast _you_ down, on this ugly little ball of dirt?”

You have never been looked at like that. Like you are - as if you are -

as if you are the beginning, as well as the end.


End file.
